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Nasturtium Sauce
Make a drawn butter (about one teacupful), add to it half a cup of pickled nasturtiums; season with salt and pepper. Let them simmer gently and then serve.
A caper sauce under another name, built on the Victorian butter sauce called "drawn butter." It comes together in minutes once you know what the two components are.
- Drawn butter is a sauce, not melted butterIn American books of this period drawn butter means a light roux-based butter sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 1 tablespoon flour, then whisked with a cup of hot water or light stock and finished with another lump of butter off the heat. It is not clarified butter, and modern recipes for the latter will not stand in.
- A teacupfulSmaller than a modern measuring cup, though period books are not consistent: reckon somewhere between half and three-quarters of a cup of finished sauce, enough to dress fish or boiled meat for perhaps three or four.
- Pickled nasturtiumsThe green seed pods, not the flowers, pickled in salt and vinegar. They were the standard domestic substitute for capers, which had to be imported. Drained nonpareil capers are the direct swap, about 1/3 cup for the half cup called for here, since capers are more sharply salted.
- Rinse and taste before saltingPickled pods carry a good deal of salt and vinegar. Drain them, taste one, and salt the sauce only at the end or it will be inedible.
- Simmer gently means gentlyHard boiling can drive the butter out of the sauce and leave it greasy, and the seed pods lose their crispness. A couple of minutes at a bare tremble should be enough to warm the pods and let the vinegar soften into the sauce.
- What to serve it withThis is the traditional accompaniment to boiled mutton or leg of lamb, and it works equally on poached white fish or boiled fowl. Serve it hot, in a warmed boat; it thickens badly as it cools.
Nasturtium came to European gardens from South America — the smaller Tropaeolum minus in the sixteenth century, the large Tropaeolum majus of the kitchen garden rather later — and was valued as much for the kitchen as for the border: the leaves and flowers go into salads, and the green seed pods, pickled, were long recommended as a homegrown stand-in for Mediterranean capers. English and American cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward carry the instruction, and the pods appear in kitchen-garden literature as a thrifty crop — a plant that would grow in poor soil and yield a condiment otherwise bought at import prices. A sauce like this one assumed a reader with a garden and a shelf of her own preserves.